Drugs and Alcohol (young people)

I believe the social harms of keeping drugs illegal outweigh the social good of trying to stop people taking them. So you should make them controlled and regulated. Have very strict controls on advertising. Have very strict controls on where you can sell them, who you can sell them to. You’d want to give it to local city councils for example so as to control the licensing like you do with the Licensing Act for alcohol. And then you’d have a system where drug users can get the drugs that they want without necessarily having to go through all the criminality, the impurity, and to be honest that’s where a lot of the risk is. You also cut out a large proportion gangs. Gangs grew up in the UK because of drug dealing.

There are areas in loads of cities that turned bad because of large-scale drug dealing and that’s where a lot of gangs came from in the UK.
 
If you legalised the system, you get rid of a lot of incentives to deal drugs – you cut out a lot of the profit.  And that would remove the motive for a lot of crime.  Most of the problems with drug use have only occurred since drug use became illegal, 40 years ago.

So I very much I consider the social harms outweigh the social benefits of keeping them illegal.
 

I’m concerned with health issues but not as much as I think the government are. Because there just, there isn’t a huge amount of research and the government. I mean the government’s position is untenable. People get fired for essentially saying the government is wrong. And when you’re firing people who are scientific advisors like Professor Nutt – then you’re not dealing with the facts or the science or the health implications.  Instead, you’re basing policy on the fact that most people think drugs are bad, and that’s a moral issue. That’s not a health issue.

The health issues with drugs are important.  But to put them in perspective, the biggest health issue is alcohol.  For government so spend so much energy using the power of force against drug user and dealers is ridiculous when they do pretty much nothing about alcohol.  It shows you that the government is not taking a principled stance, but a convenient one.
Drugs get demonised more than alcohol probably because the alcohol industry has a lot of money, a lot of lobbyists and a lot of clout.  Drug dealers might have money but they don’t get to influence politics.
 

Also, I have become much more aware of the ethical issues with drugs as of late.
 
Meaning?
 
Well cocaine is produced in South America, Latin America and people. Like it’s basically it’s the subject of a massive war. Many, many people get killed along the way of making a gram of cocaine. Like there’s serious deforestations for every few grams of cocaine there is a certain amount of deforestation that takes place to grow the crop. You’re buying into. All the money you pay is going towards serious organised crime. There is no cocaine sold by “nice people”. It’s all run by massive crime networks who do people trafficking. I don’t want to put money into that.

I’m not interested in funding killing people which is exactly what you do if you buy cocaine. And that’s another reason why I haven’t really gone near it since I had, I bought a few times just to see what it was like but I’m not interested in taking it anywhere regularly because it’s so linked to massive military campaigns.
 
Other drugs have these issues too but maybe not so much.  Cannabis does have some issues around trafficking. More cannabis is grown in the UK now, which is good, but there’s still human rights issues.  Some cannabis farms make use of trafficked people working for low wages or kept as slave labour.  Legalising and regulating cannabis production would remove the market for that, too.

Ecstasy as well, most of the ecstasy in the UK comes from the Netherlands. It’s mostly produced in mainland Europe or in labs in the UK and there’s not that many drug mules involves in the shipping process.
And so the ethical issue is another reason why I take the drugs that I do rather than cocaine.